Climate Model Inadequacies (Sea Ice)

Near the start of the current century, Holland (2001)1 wrote that with respect to contemporary state-of-the-art global climate models, “some physical processes are absent from the models,” while noting that in light of the coarse-resolution grids employed by the models, “some physical processes are ill resolved” and that others are actually “missing from the simulations,” which facts led him to question, as he put it, “whether the simulations obtained from such models are in fact physically meaningful.” And so it was that he thus went on to conduct his own analysis of the subject, which he designed to determine the difference in model evolution of sea ice cover using a relatively coarse-resolution grid verses a fine-resolution grid, with specific emphasis placed on the presence and treatment of a mesoscale ocean eddy and its influence on sea ice cover.